Luna: New Moon (27 page)

Or I could fly back to Earth, to Brazil.

That night the golden woman swooped through my dreams. Achi slept beside me. I had booked a hostel room. The bed was wide, the air was as fresh as Queen of the South could make and the taste of the water did not set your teeth on edge.

Oh, that golden woman, flying loops through my certainties.

Queen of the South hadn’t gone to a three-shift society, so it never went completely dark. I pulled Achi’s sheet around me and went out on to the balcony. I leaned on the rail and looked out at the walls of lights. Lives and decisions behind every light. This was an ugly world. It put a price on everything. It demanded a negotiation from everyone. Out at the railhead I had seen a new thing among some of the surface workers: a medallion, or a little votive tucked into a patch pocket. A woman in Virgin Mary robes, one half of her face a black angel, the other half a naked skull. It was the first time I met Dona Luna. One half of her face dead, but the other was alive. The moon was not a dead satellite, she was a living world. Hands and hearts and hopes like mine shaped her. Here there was no Mother Nature, no Gaia to set against human will. Everything that lived, we made. Dona Luna was hard and unforgiving, but she was beautiful. She could be a woman, with dragonfly wings, flying.

I stayed on the hotel balcony until the roof reddened with sun-up. Then I went back to Achi. I wanted to make love with her again. My motives were all selfish. Things that are difficult with friends are easier with lovers.

It was Achi’s idea to make a game out of it. We must clench our fists behind our backs, like Scissors, Paper, Stone, and count to three. Then we open our fists and in them there will be something, some small object, that will say beyond any doubt what we have decided. We must not speak, because if we say even a word, we will influence each other. It was the only way she could bear it, if it was quick and clean and we didn’t speak a word. And a game.

We went back to the balcony table of the café to play the game. Two glasses of mint tea. I remember the air smelled of rock dust over the usual electricity and sewage. Every fifth sky panel was blinking. A less than perfect world.

‘I think we should do this kind of quickly,’ Achi said and her right hand was behind her back so fast I caught my breath. Now, the time was now. I slipped my small object out of my bag and clenched it in my hidden fist.

‘One two three,’ Achi said. We opened our fists.

She held a nazar: an Arabic charm: concentric teardrops of blue, white and black lunar glass, like an eye.

In my hand was a tiny icon of Dona Luna: black and white, living and dead.

The last things were simple and swift. All farewells should be sudden, I think. I booked Achi on the cycler out. There was always space on the return orbit. She booked me into the LDC medical centre. A flash of light and the chib was bonded permanently to my eye. No hand shake, no congratulations, no welcome. All I had done was decide to continue doing what I was doing.

The cycler would come round the Farside and rendezvous with the moonloop in three days. Three days: it focused our feelings, it kept us from crying too much.

I went with Achi on the train to Meridian. We had a whole side row of seats to ourselves and we curled up like small burrowing animals.

I’m scared,
she said. It hurt, going back. The cycler slowly spins you up to Earth gravity and then there’s the gees coming down. She could be months in a wheelchair. Swimming, they say, is the closest a returnee can come to being on the moon. The water supports you while you build up muscle and bone mass again. Achi loved to swim. And then were the doubts. What if she had been mixed up with someone else and she was already past the point of no return? Would they try to bring her back to the moon? She couldn’t bear that. It would kill her as surely as the Earth shattering her bones, suffocating her under her own weight. I understood then that she hated the moon. She had always hated it; the danger, the fear, but most of all, the people. The same faces looking into your face, forever. Wanting something from you. Wanting and wanting and wanting. No one can live that way, she said. It’s inhuman. I was the only thing that made the moon bearable for her. And I was staying, and she was leaving.

So I told her the thing I kept secret: the thing I had seen out in Lansberg, that would make me a Dragon. It was so simple. I just looked at something I saw every day in a different way. Helium-3. The key to the post-oil economy. Mackenzie Metals threw away helium-3 every day. And I thought, how could the Mackenzies not see it? Surely they must … I couldn’t be the only one. But family and companies, and family companies especially, they have strange fixations and blindnesses. Mackenzies mine metal. Metal mining is what they do. They can’t imagine anything else and so they miss what’s right under their noses. I could make it work. That’s what I told Achi. I knew how to do it. But not with the Mackenzies. They’d take it off me. If I tried to fight, they’d just bury me. Or kill me. It’s cheaper. The Court of Clavius would make sure my family were compensated, but that would be the end of my hopes for dynasty. I would make it work for me, I would build a dynasty. I would be the Fifth Dragon. Mackenzie, Asamoah, Vorontsov, Sun: Corta. I liked the sound of that.

I told her this on the train to Meridian. The seat-back screen showed the surface. On a screen, outside your helmet, it is always the same. It is grey and soft and ugly and covered in footprints. Inside the train were workers and engineers; lovers and partners and even a couple of small children. There was noise and colour and drinking and laughing, swearing and sex. And us curled up in the back against the bulkhead. And, I thought, this is the moon.

Achi gave me a gift at the moonloop gate. It was the last thing she owned. Everything else had been sold. There were eight passengers at the departure gate, with friends, family, amors to see them off. No one left alone. The air smelled of coconut, so different from the vomit, sweat, unwashed bodies of the arrival gate. Mint tea was available from a dispensing machine. No one drank it.

Achi’s gift was a document cylinder, crafted from bamboo. My instructions were to open it after she was gone. The departure was so fast, the way they say executions are. The VTO staff had everyone strapped into their seats and were sealing the capsule door before either I or Achi could respond. I saw her mouth begin a goodbye, saw her wave fingers, then the locks sealed and the elevator took the capsule up to the tether platform.

I tried to imagine the moonloop: a spinning spoke of M5 fibre twenty centimetres wide and two hundred kilometres long. Up there the ascender was climbing towards the counterbalance mass, shifting the centre of gravity and sending the whole tether into a surface-grazing orbit. Only in the final moments of approach would the white cable be visible, seemingly descending vertically from the star-filled sky. The grapple connected and the capsule was snatched from the platform. Up there, one of those bright stars was the ascender, sliding down the tether, again shifting the centre of mass so that the whole ensemble moved into a higher orbit. At the top of the loop, the grapple would release and the cycler catch the capsule. All engineering, all process, all technical. So I kept the terrible emptiness from me, like charms. I tried to put names on the stars: the cycler, the ascender, the counterweight; the capsule freighted with my amor, my love, my friend. The comfort of physics. I watched until a new capsule was loaded into the gate. Already the next tether was wheeling up over the horizon.

Then I went to buy coffee.

Yes, coffee. The price was outrageous. I dug into my savings. But it was the real thing: imported, not spun up from an organic printer. The importer let me sniff it. I cried. She sold me the paraphernalia as well. The equipment I needed simply didn’t exist on the moon.

I took it all back to my hotel. I ground to the specified grain. I boiled the water. I let it cool to the correct temperature. I poured it from a height, for maximum aeration. I stirred it. I made it like I made this coffee, for you, Sister. You never forget these things.

While it drew I opened Achi’s gift. I unrolled drawings, concept art for a habitat the realities of the moon would never let her build. A lava tube, enlarged and sculpted with faces. The faces of the orixas, each a hundred metres high, round and smooth and serene, overlooked terraces of gardens and pools. Waters cascaded from their eyes and open lips. Pavilions and belvederes were scattered across the floor of the vast cavern; vertical gardens ran from floor to artificial sky, like the hair of the gods. Balconies – she loved balconies – galleries and arcades, windows. Pools. You could swim from one end of this Orixa-world to the other. She had inscribed it:
a habitation for a dynasty.

This is Achi’s gift, all around you.

When the importer had rubbed a pinch of ground coffee under my nose, memories of childhood, the sea, college, friends, family, celebrations flooded me. They say smell is the sense most closely linked to memory. When I smelled the coffee I had prepared, I experienced something new. Not memories, but a vision. I saw the sea, and I saw Achi, Achi-gone-back, on a board, in the sea. It was night and she was paddling the board out, through the waves and beyond the waves, sculling herself forward, along the silver track of the moon on the sea.

I plunged, poured and savoured the aroma of the coffee.

I drank my coffee.

It still doesn’t taste the way it smells.

SEVEN

‘Threw us around like fucking girls.’ Twenty monitors on Robert Mackenzie’s life-support chair peak into the orange. ‘One of them was a fucking girl.’

The news had flashed down Crucible’s spinal chord, familiar to familiar:
Duncan Mackenzie is leaving Fern Gully
. Unprecedented. Unthinkable. Unholy. Jade Sun oversaw the delicate loading of her husband’s life-support unit into transit capsule. Her words were soft and kind and encouraging and left the ancillary staff pale with fear. The capsule sped along beneath the incinerating glare of smelting mirrors to Car 27. Duncan Mackenzie’s private apartments.

‘She was a Jo Moonbeam,’ Duncan Mackenzie says.

‘You offer any kind of excuse for this?’ Jade Sun says, always one discreet step behind Bob Mackenzie’s right shoulder.

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘It’s not the fight, it’s never a fucking duster fight,’ Bob Mackenzie says. His voice is a rattle of respirators, his lungs half moon from years of inhaling dust. ‘They bent us over and fucked it right up us. Have you see the social net? Asamoahs, Vorontsovs, even the Suns are laughing at us. Even the Eagle of the fucking Moon.’

‘We would never laugh at your misfortune, my love,’ Jade Sun says.

‘Well you’re a fool. I would if I were you. Fucking Brazilians on kids’ bikes.’

‘They got the jump on us,’ Duncan says. ‘It’s a set-back.’
You smell vile,
Duncan realises. A sickly excremental tang, the sourness of urine, the thin disguise of sterilising swabs and anti-bacterial. His skin smells, his hair smells. Oils and caked sweats and exudations. His teeth smell; his vile hideous teeth. Duncan can’t bear to look at those yellow stumps. How much better one fast, sharp punch and knock them out so he would never have to look at them again. That would kill the old man. Punch clean through packboard-soft crumbling bone into the soft pulp of his brain.

‘A set-back?’ Bob Mackenzie says. ‘We’ve lost our entire north-west quadrant project. We’ll be five years getting our helium operation out from under this pile of shit. Adrian had the tip-off directly from the Eagle. Adrian is a greasy little weasel but he knows how to protect a source. Someone leaked it. One of ours. We’ve a traitor. More than anything, I fucking hate traitors.’

‘I’ve read Eoin Keefe’s report. Our encryption is secure.’

‘Eoin Keefe is a coward who’s never put his balls on the block for this family.’ One step behind Jade Sun’s right shoulder; a lithe, intimidating presence, is Hadley Mackenzie. Duncan detests his father’s presence in his private rooms, but he is patriarch, silverback, he has the right. Hadley he resents because his presence implies soft words and murmured decisions among the green fronds of Fern Gully, decisions to which Duncan is not party.

‘Hadley has replaced Eoin Keefe,’ Jade Sun says mildly.

‘This is not your call,’ Duncan says. ‘You do not replace my heads of department.’

‘I replace who the fuck I want when the fuck I want,’ Robert Mackenzie says and Duncan understands the vulnerability of his position.

‘This is a board decision,’ Duncan murmurs.

‘Board!’ Robert Mackenzie shouts with all the spit he can summon. ‘This family is at war.’

Does Duncan see a small smile flicker across Jade Sun’s face?

‘We’re a business. Businesses don’t fight wars.’

‘I did,’ Robert Mackenzie says.

‘This is a whole new moon.’

‘The moon doesn’t change.’

‘There is no profit in fighting the Cortas.’

‘We’d have our pride,’ Hadley says. Duncan stands close to him; eye to eye, breath-close.

‘Can you breathe pride? Step out there and say that to Lady Moon:
I’ve got my Mackenzie pride.
We fight them the way we do best. We make money. Mackenzie Metals isn’t pride, Mackenzie Metals isn’t family; it’s a machine for making money. It’s a machine for sending profits back to all those investors; those fund owners and venture capitalists back on Earth who trusted you, Dad, to take their money to the moon and make it work for them. They’re Mackenzie Metals. Not us.’

Robert Mackenzie growls in his stone lungs.

‘My husband is very tired,’ Jade Sun says. ‘Emotions are exhausting for him.’ Robert’s LSU chair turns and Duncan knows it is against the old monster’s will. The inlock to the transit capsule opens. Hadley nods to his half-brother and follows the slow-rolling entourage.

‘We need peace with the Cortas!’ Duncan shouts after them.

She sees Wagner in the chair and freezes.

‘Everyone in this bar is a wolf,’ Wagner says. She looks around. The two women at the near table, the group at the far table, the lone drinker at the bar, the handsome couple in the booth, turn and look at her. The bartender nods. Wagner indicates the seat opposite him.

‘Please. Something to drink?’

She names a herbal cocktail unknown to Wagner. You were frightened before you entered this room, he thinks. But you became angry the moment you saw me. I can read this in the dilation of your pupils, the fixtures of your jawline, the lines on the back of your hand around the glass, the flare of your nostrils; a hundred micro-tells. Sometimes the heightened senses of his full-self overwhelms Wagner in barrage of impressions; sometimes their insight is as precise as a fighting knife. He can smell the components of her drink: a basil and tarragon spritzer with a dash of sours. The water is Peary ice-fresh.

‘You set that up well,’ she says.

‘Thank you. I worked hard at it. I knew you’d run background checks. Did you like the social profile? Minor shareholder in the Polar Lunatics. I actually took a position in the team, in case you checked that. I sold it back when my people told me you were at the door.’ He’s over-telling. It’s a danger in his light-self. Everything is there at once inside him: words fight for a place through the narrow doors of thought and voice. Mundanes are so slow.

‘You were never that diligent in the colloquium.’

‘Diligent. Diligent, yes. No. I’ve changed a lot since then.’

‘So I’ve heard. That’s your usual familiar?’

‘Everything is different when the Earth is round,’ Wagner says.

‘I am scared of you,’ Elisa Stracchi says.

‘Of course. Yes. I had to make sure you wouldn’t run. But I just want information, Elisa.’

‘I didn’t know what it was for.’

Wagner leans forward. Elisa Stracchi flinches at the intensity of his gaze.

‘I don’t think I believe that. No, I don’t believe that at all. An assassination attempt on my brother? Bio-processors specifically designed for a fly-based neurotoxin delivery system? I don’t believe that.’

‘Would you believe me if I told you I have no idea who the client was?’

‘I do believe that you would carry out the same due diligence on your client as you did on me. From which I can conclude that the real client was concealed by a similar nest of shell companies.’

‘You sound like a fucking dick, Wagner,’ Elisa says. Her foot jerks under the table. It does not take wolf senses to read that tell.

‘Sorry. Sorry. Who did you deliver to?’

‘Am I safe, Wagner?’

Wagner wishes he could stop reading her face. Every unconscious muscular twitch and tensing triggers empathies and anxieties in him. Sometimes he wishes that he could just stop perceiving so minutely, reading so deeply. To stop that would be to stop being Wagner Corta.

‘We will protect you.’

She flicks Dr Luz the address of a corporate upload box. Dr Luz interrogates. A shell company, now closed down. She must have known this. The question for Wagner is how many other shell companies and dead drops the file went through before arriving at an assembler. His thoughts are already scurrying along a dozen different paths at once. Wagner thinks of his full mind as a quantum computer; exploring possibilities in many parallel universes at once, then collapsing the superimposed states to a single decision. He knows what to do next.

‘Wagner.’

It’s seconds before Wagner can refocus. Then, full seconds are instants to mundane folk.

‘Fuck you forever. Once a Corta, always a fucking Corta. No one’s ever said no to you, have they? You don’t even understand the word.’

But she hesitates, just a second, just enough, when she turns to leave and finds the bar empty. Wagner doesn’t have the authority to hire private security on the Corta account. He can hire a bar out of his own pocket. And he can crew it with his friends, his family, his pack mates.

That night he runs with his pack up into the roof of the city. Up there, as close as architecture allows to the light of the Earth, old service tunnels have been scraped out into chambers and vesicles. It’s a bar, a club, a lair. It’s like partying in a lung. The air is stagnant and stale. The bar smells of bodies and perfumes and cheap vodka with the polycarbonate tang of the manufactories. The light is blue, Earthshine blue, the music real not piped privately through familiars and so loud it’s physical.

The Magdalena pack from Queen of the South has come to Meridian. They’re the oldest of the moon packs; from the dream-time they have been led by Sasha Volchonok Ermin. Né claims to be the oldest wolf on the moon; first to lift up ner eyes and howl at the Earth. First to claim the pronoun. Né’s a First gen, a head shorter than any of ner pack, but ner charisma lights the bar like Diwali. Wagner finds ner intimidating; né has no regard for him, thinks him a soft aristocrat, no true wolf. Ner pack are rough and aggressive and believe themselves true heirs of the two natures. But they give good party. Already fighters are lining up in the pit, stripped to skins and hankering to wrestle. Wagner is a talker not a fighter and he finds a cavity in the warren of tunnels equally distant from the cheering and the DJ where he holds three conversations simultaneously with a roboticist with Taiyang Moongrid, a broker in physics-limited derivatives and an interior designer specialising in custom woods.

A Magdalena girl arrives on the edge of the conversations. When the Earth is round the wolves of the moon scorn mundane fashion: she is dressed in a lime-green suit-liner, be-scribbled by marker pens in the frenetic, spiralling, winding doodles of the Earth-lit visual imagination.

‘You’re small you’re sweet you smell good,’ she whispers and Wagner picks out every word from the weave of small talk.

‘That’s a look,’ he says.

‘It was a thing, then not a thing, so now a thing again,’ she says. ‘I’m Irina.’ Her familiar is a horned skull with flames flickering from its eyes and nostrils. Another look that was a thing, then not a thing, then a thing again. Wagner has always wondered where the short-lived fad for graffitied suit-liners came from.

‘I’m …’

‘I know who you are, Little Wolf.’

She closes her teeth on his earlobe and whispers, ‘I like to bite.’

‘I like to be bitten,’ Wagner says but before she can haul him away he puts a hand on her breastbone. He can feel every heartbeat, every breath, every surge of blood through her arteries. She smells of honey and patchouli. ‘I have to go to my mamãe’s birthday party tomorrow.’

‘Then respect your Mom and don’t show her too much skin.’

The two suits step in on either side of Lucasinho. He doesn’t know who they are but he knows whose they are.

Lucas Corta sits on the couch where Lucasinho slept. Neat, precise, hands lightly resting on his thighs. Flavia crouches in a corner, among the saints. Her eyes are wide with fear. Her chest heaves, she visibly fights for every breath. Her hands flutter at her chest. Lucasinho has never seen this before but every moon-born know what it is. Her breath has been shorted. She is drowning in clear air.

‘Give her her breath back!’ Lucasinho yells. He crouches beside Madrinha Flavia, his arm around her.

‘Of course,’ Lucas Corta says. ‘Toquinho.’ Flavia takes a deep, rattling, whooping breath, breaks into coughing and choking. Lucasinho pulls her close. Her eyes are scared.

‘Wagner pays for—’

‘I made the LDC a better offer,’ Lucas says. ‘It seems a sensible precaution. If you don’t breathe, you don’t talk.’

‘Fuck you,’ Lucasinho says.

‘You’ve been off the network so you may not know that we’ve scored a famous victory. Corta Hélio. Your family. We’ve staked out new helium-3 exploitation territories in Mare Anguis. The Court of Clavius has recognised our claim. I’ve secured the future for you, son. What do you say to that?’

‘Congratulations.’

‘Thank you.’

Madrinha Flavia’s breathing is even now but still she cowers as if each breath might be her last.

‘Oh, yes. I almost forgot. Switch on Jinji. Go on. You might as well.

Boot is successful,
Jinji says.
Full access to your accounts has been restored.

‘Feels good to have money and carbon and network, doesn’t it?’ Lucas says. ‘Toquinho.’ The pattern of notes above Lucas’s shoulder spin. There is a spray of virtual notes.

I’ve received a contract transfer,
Jinji says.
It’s the Four Elementals account for Flavia Vila Nova. Do you accept?

‘Your madrinha looked after you,’ Lucas says. ‘It’s only proper that you should look after her.’

Do you accept?
Jinji urges.

‘Flavia,’ Lucasinho says, ‘It’s your account. Pai wants me to take it over. I have to do that.’ Then, to his father, ‘I accept. It’s still your money.’

‘Yes. But I never did buy you a pet when you were a boy, did I?’ Lucas stands up, brushes imaginary dust from his trousers. A nod, the security suits move to the door. ‘One last thing. The important bit. The reason I came. You love parties. Everyone loves parties. I’ve a party invitation for you. Your grandmother’s birthday. Bring a cake. You’re good at cakes. I don’t care if you keep your clothes on or off when you’re making it, but it’s eighty candles.’

Yemanja wakes Adriana Corta with music:
Aguas de Marco
: her favourite. Elis and Tom cover.

Thank you,
she whispers to her familiar and lies under her light sheet, looking up at the ceiling, listening to the music, wondering why this tune, this morning. She remembers. It is her birthday. She is eighty years old today.